Mondongo

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1999

            Mondongo is a collective of Argentine artists, created in 1999 by Juliana Laffitte, Manuel Mendanha, and Agustina Picasso. Mondongo's concept is to work collectively, skeptical of the authorship of ideas. They do not sign their paintings, not even on the back, but it is difficult not to recognize them: the material with which they create is their hallmark; their pieces create tension between the materiality of technique and image, always using unconventional objects. The Mondongo is also a stew, "a dish that people either hate or love, very controversial," according to Laffitte. And there is something of that in their work and in their way of working; they are known as rara avis, art weirdos who go against everything.

            Among their most outstanding pieces are the Serie Roja, a re-reading of, Charles Perrault's classic, Little Red Riding Hood and the Serie Negra, a series of porn images taken from the internet and reproduced with food. They also made their self-portraits and an image of the White House with smoked cold cuts, a lotus flower with 300,000 chopsticks, and an image of childbirth made with mirrors. Power, work, economy, and sexuality are some of the themes that run through them and were also reflected in portraits of famous people. These portraits became so well known that people began to commission them. The most outstanding one was for the Spanish royal family, for which the collective made a work based on colored mirrors, which referred to colonialism and the trade of goods in the Spanish conquest of American territory, but the explanation the artists offered the buyers was that they used colored mirrors because the Spanish people loved to see themselves reflected in the crown. This was a turning point in the group's trajectory.

            Their artwork poetically shows the work of condensed time; each thread, each fragment of material is deployed in precise and handcrafted movements, to emulate the utopia of a transcendence. Mondongo is a living organism: Agustina Picasso moved to the United States in 2008 and has not participated in the group since then; however, the group has a continuous flow of artists. For more than twenty years, the collective has been promoting a different way of doing things, seeking to go beyond limits, concepts, and scales. In recent years, they have added performance and animated dolls to their work, a complex universe that they call óleo lento, a work that unfolds in different formats, a large painting that mainly requires something that is currently in short supply: time.